The Speech that Made Nixon's Dog Famous

Mr. Olshaker is a longtime freelance writer whose work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times and TomPaine.com.

The night of September 23, 1952-50 years ago this week-39-year-old California
Senator Richard Nixon appeared on nationwide television to answer charges concerning
an "expense fund" he had been given by wealthy California businessmen.
Emotionally distraught, under fire from enemies, betrayed by party colleagues
only minutes earlier, the vice-presidential candidate made a half-hour appeal
that not only saved his career from early ruin, but boosted the Republican party
in mid-campaign and made him a hero to millions. The speech, best remembered for
its mention of his dog Checkers, generated an outpouring of emotion unprecedented
in the history of American presidential elections.

How did Nixon work such magic? And what kind of precedent did his performance
and its dramatic aftermath set for future candidates for high office?

According to the conventional wisdom, the media and even modern technology
in general were Nixon's repeated undoing-the televised 1960 presidential debates
that gave the telegenic John F. Kennedy the edge; the press coverage which Nixon
believed to be unfairly slanted against him, treating him as someone to "kick
around"; even his own personally controlled media-the White House audiotape
system-which brought him down in the end. Yet if we judge his 1952 financial
explanation by its results, a compelling case could be made that Nixon was a
uniquely gifted media genius.

The fund furor had begun five days earlier when a New York Post article
stated that Nixon had received $18,235 from a total of 76 contributors. Was
the money, as the New Republic charged, "a subsidy from wealthy
Republicans who have a certain political axe they want young Nixon to wield,"
or were the donations intended merely to defray the political expenses of a
poor-but-honest young senator? The New Republic pointed out that the
contributors included real estate men, and that Nixon had voted against public
housing and rent control. Also included were oil executives, whose interests
Nixon had championed. The article noted that "the business firms with which
[the contributors] are connected and the fields of industry and finance represented
are very familiar to those who follow pressure politics in Washington and are
informed about how much they invest in regular lobbying activities."

When the story of the fund unfolded, General Dwight Eisenhower was in the Midwest,
spreading the word that as president he would clean up the "mess in Washington"
by driving out the "crooks and cronies" of the Truman administration.
Aides informed Eisenhower that it was the almost unanimous view of newsmen aboard
the campaign train that he would lose unless he dropped Nixon as running mate.

Nixon's immediate reaction was to label the story of the fund a "typical
left-wing smear." Campaigning in California, Nixon declared, "The
purpose of those smears is to make me relent and let up on my attacks on
the Communists and crooks in the present administration."

However, it was clear to Nixon that his continued presence on the ticket would
make a mockery of the anti-corruption theme unless he cleared his name. "The
course he chose was so improbable that even Hollywood might have hesitated to
accept such a script," Life magazine reported at the time.

When he arrived at the El Capitan Theater, an NBC television studio in Hollywood,
Nixon had no written script. At his insistence, spectators were barred from
the broadcast. Nixon told no one what he planned to say. Extra cameras were
activated because the details of his speech were not known, and the technicians
were uncertain as to whether he would remain seated at his desk. His wife Pat
was seated on the stage several feet from him. As if the pressure weren't already
high, a few minutes earlier Governor Thomas Dewey had called and told Nixon
that Eisenhower's staff wanted him to submit his resignation at the end of the
broadcast.

Speaking to more than 30 million television viewers and a huge radio audience,
Nixon "exposed his life story with a strange mixture of pathos and condor,"
Life reported. "All the television lens saw was an earnest young
man; the opening words revealed a deep hurt and a troubled heart." Nixon
stated that the 76 contributors had asked for no special favors, expected none,
and got none. All of the money had gone to "political expenses I did not
think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States."

"I am going to give this television and radio audience a complete financial
history; everything I've earned, everything I've spent, everything I owe, and
I want you to know the facts," he said. Most of his early life was spent
in his family's grocery store. "The only reason we were able to make it
go was because my mother and dad had five boys and we all worked in the store."
He described his financial standing at each point in his life-college, marriage,
law school, Navy, U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator. He went on to detail his
modest holdings and considerable debts. The camera panned to his wife when Nixon
said, "Pat doesn't own a mink coat."

Nixon announced that he would not quit as Ike's running mate unless the Republican
National Committee asked him to, and called on listeners to send letters and
wires to "help them decide."

After explaining his debts, Nixon added, "One other thing I probably should
tell you, because if I don't they'll probably be saying this about me, too-we
did get something, a gift, after the election the day before we left on
this campaign trip, we got a message from the Union Station in Baltimore, saying
they had a package for us. It was a little cocker-spaniel dog and our little
girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers. And you know the kids, like
all kids, love the dog and regardless of what they say about it, we're
going to keep it."

At this point, Nixon had used only 15 minutes of his allotted time. He devoted
the second half of the broadcast to an attack on the Truman administration and
the Democratic ticket of Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman. When he ran overtime,
technicians cut him off in mid-sentence. By pure accident, the speech ended
in the midst of an appeal for Eisenhower: "And remember, folks, Eisenhower
is a great man, believe me. He's a great man . "

He was deeply disappointed with his performance. "I couldn't do it. I
wasn't any good," said Nixon, and he broke into sobs. He was especially
upset that he was cut off before having a chance to give the address of the
RNC. Studio technicians reassured him; some of the camera crew were weeping.

Eisenhower, with his wife Mamie and her mother, watched Nixon's broadcast in
the manager's office of the Cleveland Public Auditorium, where he had delayed
his speech on inflation so that Nixon's speech could be piped into the auditorium.
Men and women in the auditorium wept openly as they listened to Nixon's voice.
In the office, Mamie and her mother wept, and Eisenhower's eyes reportedly filled
with tears.

When the speech ended, Eisenhower's press aide, James C. Hagerty, said, "General,
you'll have to throw your speech away. Those people out there want to hear about
Nixon." While Ike wrote notes for another speech, the crowd chanted, "We
want Nixon." Rep. George Bender, who was presiding, shouted: "Are
you in favor of Nixon?" and the crowd, as Newsweek reported, "went
wild, screaming, whistling, and leaping from their seats." Eisenhower appeared
and stated, "Tonight, I saw an example of courage. I have seen many brave
men in tough situations. I have never seen any come through in better fashion
than Senator Nixon did tonight " He recalled a dramatic parallel from
World War II. "In my command, I had a singularly brave and skillful leader "
He went on to compare young Nixon with the deceased General George Patton.

Significantly, despite such praise for Nixon, Eisenhower reserved judgment
on whether or not to keep him on the ticket, asserting authority over his running
mate by summoning him to meet him in Wheeling, West Virginia. Not about to be
humiliated, Nixon insisted on flying to Missoula, Montana for a scheduled speech,
declaring, "What more does he want? I'm not going to crawl on my hands
and knees to him." Fortunately for Nixon, the enormously favorable emotional
clamor his broadcast had created saved him from such a fate. After a call explaining
that he was still on the ticket, Nixon flew to Wheeling and was greeted by Eisenhower.
"Dick," Ike said, extending his hand, "you're my boy." Amid
the cheering of the airport crowd, Nixon broke down in tears. Life stated, "This
extraordinary moment was the extraordinary climax of a national outpouring of
emotion which was without parallel in American politics."

While Republicans hailed the speech as a masterpiece, Democrats called it "soap
opera." But no one disputed that it had been phenomenally effective. The
RNC was flooded with telegrams, letters, and telephone calls which, by week's
end, reached two million. The mail was 350 to 1 in favor of keeping Nixon on
the ticket.

Editorial comment on the "Checkers" speech varied widely. The New
York Post stated that "the corn overshadowed the drama," and that
the question still unanswered was "whether it is ethical, defensible, or
desirable for a member of the U.S. Senate to accept an 'expense fund' from members
of wealthy special-interest groups that have a direct stake in the legislative
business of the Senate."

The New York Journal American saw it differently: "Senator Nixon
spoke from his heart in an eloquent and manly explanation of his financial affairs
down to the last detail. He was fighting against what amounted to a colossal
smear He was, in our opinion, simply magnificent."

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted, "Only a man of colossal
nerve would undertake to convert the liability of his 'trust fund' into an asset
by arguing with a straight face that he used it to save the taxpayers' money."

And the Dallas Morning News stated, " no one who heard his
frank talk to his country Tuesday night could fail to recognize that the man
who faced his critics was the sort of he-man who has made the country what it
is."

CBS Board Chairman William S. Paley once stated that 1952 was the first election
year in which television was "a dominating factor," and "the
degree to which it shaped the mind and behavior of the individual American voter,
the electorate as a whole, and the candidates themselves, still remains to be
fully comprehended." He called television "a contributing factor of
enormous weight" in achieving a record voter turnout of 63 million. According
to the Nielsen Television Index, the Nixon financial explanation was the most
widely viewed event of the 1952 campaign.

Nixon had commanded the attention of "the largest television audience
ever for any campaign speech," according to Kurt and Gladys Lang in their
book Politics and Television, and had used the medium artfully to reach
millions of hearts. Some observers have gone so far as to delve into the symbolism
he used. Media critic Gilbert Seldes posed the question, "Did the camera
panning over to Mrs. Nixon add the image of 'Whistler's Mother' (the pose was
similar) to the verbal stimulus of Nixon's emphasis on 'Pat' and March 17 as
her birthday?" The Langs also pointed out that Nixon's television appearance
had transformed an issue of political morality into an issue of personal honesty
and likability. This effect was revealed in "man in the street" reactions:

"The people who own dogs like I do are for Nixon. That story about the
dog for his children made me love him."

"Nixon was so utterly sincere that no one could doubt his honesty."

September 23, 1952 was the day that a revolutionary new reality--the triumph
of image and personality over ideas and substance in the television age--arrived
to change the face of American politics forever. While "likability"
is a factor that defies measurement, a strong case can be made that the matinee-idol
charm of Presidents Reagan and Clinton helped both of them to win two terms
and to weather the multiple scandals of their administrations. In the same vein,
Al Gore's defeat of George W. Bush in three presidential-election debates was
overshadowed by the negative focus on Gore's mannerisms and personality, ultimately
working in Bush's favor. The likability factor was also dramatically evident
in a New York Times-CBS poll taken last July-nearly 60 percent of respondents
believed Bush wasn't coming clean on his controversial Harken Oil dealings,
yet the same poll gave Bush a 70-percent approval rating.

Kurt and Gladys Lang also noted, "While there was much criticism of Nixon's
unscrupulous use of theatrics, his 'soap-opera' appeal, the low level of intelligence
at which he pitched his defense, and the use of show business methods in politics,
no one could deny that his political technique had been effective. But what
about 'appealing' one's case to the great American 'jury,' when there were no
rules of evidence? Was television's capacity for revealing the truth so inescapable?"

The use of emotion-inciting propaganda techniques in a medium whose effects
were so immediate had arguably created an instance of what legendary journalist
Walter Lippmann called "mob law by modern electronics." Lippmann expressed
dismay that a television audience was allowed to be judge of charges "so
serious that for five days General Eisenhower reserved his own judgment on whether
to clear him or condemn him." According to Lippmann, the personal defense
should have been given to Eisenhower, not to the television audience. "What
the viewers should have been given was General Eisenhower's decision, backed
by a full and objective account of the facts and the points of law and of morals
which are involved."

Nixon's broadcast truly overshadowed and even dissolved his scandal, as he
succeeded in making the average voter-the citizen with a mortgage, bills, and
pet dog-identify with his own financial predicament as a young legislator. Adding
to this his emotional assertion that his integrity had been questioned and that
he was deeply in trouble, he won the sympathy and support of millions, transforming
himself from a liability into what Life called "a new force in the
party with a prestige seldom enjoyed by a vice-presidential candidate."
The half-hour speech still referred to by the name of a cocker spaniel worked
an unlikely miracle almost certainly unmatched by any campaign speech in American
politics before or since.